And although Chelsea Wolfe’s album out Friday is arguably her most spiritual yet, dripping with poetic lyricism about tarot, underworlds and bathing in blood,
Assisted by producer Dave Sitek, the goth-folk shapeshifter explores a new dimension of her sound, bringing electronic atmospheres and industrial menace to an album about submitting to the unknown.
Often in popular culture, witchcraft is associated with a kind of feminist reclamation of power and spite-fueled revenge. “Over the years, as I’ve embraced a path of witchcraft and following the cycles of the seasons and the cycles of the moon, I put that into my writing process a lot, and I’ve started to share that more because this has been such a positive, wonderful thing in my life,” Wolfe explains. Although Wolfe frequently brings nearly finished demos to the studio to be fine-tuned and recorded for an album, this time around, she decided to work with producer Dave Sitek, who heavily transformed her rock-sounding songs.